Thursday, September 25, 2014

I Just don't know. Tell me that's ok.

I’ve often equated my relationship to romantic relationships to the Joker’s explanation for his actions: “I’m like a dog chasing cars: I wouldn’t know what to with it if I caught one.”
In the film, Up in The Air, George Clooney’s character believes his own philosophy that less is more, is true. Watching his motivational speech in the film, I find it resonating.


Imagine you wake up with nothing “kind of exhilarating isn’t it?”
Of course, Clooney goes on to fall for a real human and find his philosophy crushed, But the romance of retreat remains.
Everybody I talk to these days seem to want to travel or to live in the woods in a “self-sustainable” cabin.

We love the story of an artist writing a masterpiece In a lonely house in the woods, or the breakup album written on a journey of self-reinvention, but aren’t the greatest creative works really collective; the product of a crowd working closely on the same project?
If we are told to own our choices, then we are implicatively responsible for our failures, and this is what I think I truly am afraid of… the breakup. The hurt caused to someone else. The scar inflicted on myself, about which someone else may someday, upon seeing, ask “how?”
Who says we can’t share our trials and errors? Who says they have to be regretted every time? Who says we can’t come home and admit our ideal decrepit?

Thursday, September 04, 2014

I love the end scene of Cast Away

I’ve heard that dreaming about owning something can bring just as much pleasure as actually owning it. Say, a boat. I spend a lot of enjoyable time wandering around boatyards with a coffee in my hand imagining what it would be like to have one of them. Actually owning one, however, makes me think I’d be stressed when I’m using it that I had picked the wrong one, and stressed when I’m not using it thinking of the moorage cost. Then I’d also have to think about maintenance, insurance, depreciation, and safety. They say that the day a man buys a boat is the best day of his life, second only to the day he sells it.
The Romance of possibility is rather beauteous. There is this coffee chain that extends the island, and some of the mainland, and they all tend to have a similar ethos. The funny thing is that often when I walk into one, I am flooded with sentimentality, which I’ve placed in the planning I’ve made while sitting in one. Particularly it was one time when I was on a road trip and stopped in to take coffee, take notes, and decide my next road. The sentimental moment was one where I had few ties, no real obligations, a set amount of free time, and enough money that I didn’t have to think about gasoline. I could pick any road and go anywhere the road took me.
I loved that feeling and I’m pretty sure I think I still do.


But is this just fear? Would I be better off role-playing, living in fantasy all my life than actually taking the risk of committing to a destination? Maybe, but will I have lived well? This I don’t know.